Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend

Monthly Archives: April 2005

If you were a fan of the old TechTV show The ScreenSavers, head right over to Leo Laporte’s weblog to download the MP3 for the first episode of his podcast The Revenge of the Bleep. Bleep in this case stands in for “ScreenSavers”, something that Leo can’t really say because he’s no longer doing his TechTV gig. But that didn’t stop him from getting together with Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, and Robert Heron (you may remember him as one of the best lab guys from the old days) to record a podcast about tech stuff. Very very cool. At the end they start talking about crazy ways they could do video or a new TV show and I really would love to see that.
G4 (and what is left of TechTV) doesn’t really hold much interest for me anymore. The “tech” seems to have left the house and what is left isn’t even particularly entertaining. A new show with these guys would be great.
BTW Leo, you missed one place where you said ScreenSavers 🙂

Desktop publishing meant that anybody could create books, magazines, etc. and if they had the talent they could make it look as good as a major publisher. The World Wide Web was much the same thing again except that it went beyond just the creation of material, it included a distribution method as well and we’ve all gotten to enjoy the results of that great experiment.Podcasting has given us narrow cast radio for any topic and stars and shows that are so far removed from “radio” that I could almost dance for joy. Of course part of that might come from the fact that I live in a radio market with at least four Clear Channel stations in dominant positions on the dial and another channel that prides itself on how different it is but in truth it’s just a station sans DJ run from a hard drive. It’s like borrowing someone else’s iPod except that they added commercials to their playlists.
I’m going to jabber on at lenth about podcasting in the future but I just wanted to put in a quick plug for Tim Shadel’s Zdot podcast. It’s all about professional development using Java and other tools like Subversion which are language agnostic. If you do development for a living it’s well worth dipping into the archives for a listen. My only complaint is that sometimes he’s not working from a tight set of notes or watching the clock so you could probably cut 5-10 minutes out of every show without any real loss of material. But that’s easy for me to say, I’m not doing a show myself 🙂
“Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.” I did this one (letter) longer only because I didn’t have the time to make it shorter. – Blaise Pascal